Damage

Call it whatever you like—DPS, damage per second—we just call it DAMAGE, and when it comes to making red bars go down, you can never have enough of it. Don't trivialize it though; damage is a very versatile aspect of combat. There are so many ways that a character can do damage.

— GuildWars2.com promotional material

Contents

Damage is any effect from an action which results in a target losing health. Damage is considered to be one of the three facets the Guild Wars 2 combat system is built around, the others being support and control. All professions are able to deal damage in a useful way, mostly by using skills. Direct damage and condition damage are the two primary forms of damage. The term damage usually refers to direct damage in the game.

There are three types of damage in Guild Wars 2:

Direct damage. This damage is inflicted by skills and/or traits directly, can crit, and is mitigated by the target's armor.

Condition damage. This damage is inflicted primarily by conditions, does not crit and is not mitigated by the target's armor.

Falling damage. This damage is taken from falling. When taken below zero health by falling damage, the player does not enter a downed state but instead becomes defeated immediately. Falling damage scales with height fallen and is not mitigated by armor or any skills that reduce or prevent damage, but can be halved by one specific trait that varies by profession (see below), or reduced to zero in World versus World by the effect of Windfall. Defeat from falling does not result in damaged armor.

Weapon strength: a uniformly distributed random number taken from the range of weapon strength of the equipped weapon. The weapon strength used for a skill will typically be that of the weapon associated with that skill; utility and elite skills are typically not affected by weapon strength and use a range based on the player's level. The weapon strength is also fixed for the duration of the skill, in particular pulsing aoes and channeled skills; although damage per hit is still affected by attributes, potions, sigils and other modifiers.

Average weapon strength is the average of the range of damage listed as Weapon Strength on the equipped weapon's tooltip.

The damage actually done is unlikely to equal to the tooltip damage, since it depends on your opponent's Armor value and other factors listed above.

At level 80, the opponent Armor value used to calculate the tooltip's direct damage is 2597. The value the game uses at other levels can be derived from the amount shown in the tooltip using the damage formula.

Some skills do not calculate their tooltip damage based on the equipped weapon. These are frequently the same skills that are unaffected by Weapon Strength.

Some skills list multiple strikes of Direct Damage. Each strike is treated independently as to whether it hits or misses and for the application of modifying effects. Using "Damage (2x): 500" as an example, the base damage of each strike is 250. Each strike that hits will have relevant modifying effects applied to it (crit, glancing, etc.).

Some skills which apply conditions, such as Burning, may also have direct damage associated with them. For example: Damage (8x): 800, 8x Burning (2s): 4800. In this case the fire will apply 8 pulses of direct damage of 100 each at 1sec intervals. Each direct damage pulse will apply 1 stack of burning each having 2 second duration.

The skill-fact damage is the tooltip damage displayed in the game for a level 80 character with an exotic level 80 weapon (if it is a weapon skill), but without any further equipment and without any other damage increasing effects. It is the default direct damage dealt by a level 80 character with base power 1000 against armor 2597, see Skill Facts for details.

For power 1000 and target armor 2597 the formula says that damage done is equal to skill-fact damage.

Damage is proportional to power. Twice the power means twice the damage. For example, increasing power from 1000 to 2289 by wearing exotic Soldier equipment leads to 2.289 times the damage.

Damage is inversely proportional to target armor. Twice the target armor means half the damage. This applies equally to the case when the player is the target.

Damage here refers to non-critical hits. The average damage increase due to critical hits can be formulated by replacing power by an increased effective power in the above formulas. Damage is then proportional to effective power, which includes the effect of precision and ferocity.

The skill-fact damage combines the average weapon strength and the skill coefficient into one convenient number for damage calculation for level 80 exotics. The skill coefficient is not shown in-game but has to be computed from the above formulas, while the skill-fact damage is given directly by the tooltip.

The skill-fact damage formula can also be used to obtain damage for ascended weapons. Since the average weapon strength of ascended weapons is 5% higher than that of exotic weapons, multiply the result by 1.05.

Given the default direct damage at power 1000 (for example from the Wiki) and the weapon strength, the skill coefficient can be computed. This relation should hold approximately for all skill entries on the Wiki.

Given the direct damage for some other power value (for example from the in-game tooltip), the skill coefficient is given by the second equality.

Small differences in the skill-coefficients are expected because of numerical round-off errors. For example, a tooltip of 100 is accurate to about 1%. For reliable results, it is advisable to compute the skill coefficient for several different power values and combine the results. The numerical result may be a coefficient of 1.006471, which can be assumed to be an exact 1.0. However, in some cases it is not clear what number the game uses internally. The approach seems valid since in many cases the above calculation leads to simple numbers like 1.0, 0.4, or 2.5.

Weapon strength is shown in the game for weapons, but it is not shown for utility skills or other sources of damage. Assuming that the game uses simple skill coefficients for such skills as well, we can use the formula to compute a weapon strength for most non-weapon attacks to be 690.5 at level 80 from the tooltip damage and some assumed skill coefficient.

Bundles, including kits and conjures, appear to have an internal weapon strength of 922.5. This is the same value as a one-handed main hand weapon in sPvP, but it is then given a further modifier in PvE/WvW based on the rarity of the weapon, with exotic being the default.

A fall from a sufficient height will instantly put a character into the defeated state.

A character that falls takes damage, which depends on the distance fallen; a character can become defeated if the fall is far enough. The damage is proportional to the character's health- a level 80 character and a level 1 character falling from the same height will both lose approximately the same percentage of their maximum health. Landing in water negates fall damage, although invulnerability does not. Armor is never damaged by falling damage unless you are already within the downed state while falling.

Nonfatal falls can still be quite dangerous in areas with hostile NPCs, as sufficiently long falls can cause characters to be knocked prone upon landing; this leaves the character vulnerable to attacks whilst recovering.

Slopes

You can fall while attempting to navigate a slope, since it is more difficult to estimate the height and angle. Sometimes, instead of sliding safely down, a character can be inflicted by repeated short falls that are each far enough to cause falling damage, sometimes resulting in becoming defeated, even though individually the falls would not have been fatal.

Forcing opponents to fall

In WvW and PvP, you can cause other players to fall by using control effects, such as fear and knockback, to move them over the edge, but NPCs will never fall off ledges.

Sometimes after falling, your character may uncontrollably run off despite that your character is still facing flat on the ground. This bug causes disadvantages while going through jumping puzzles where platforms above falling pits are narrow.